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I go to a few meetings right now where we read the Set Aside Prayer at the beginning. And every time, I am glad I hear it.
As a refresher, here it is:
God, today help me set aside everything I think I know about you, everything I think I know about myself, everything I think I know about others, and everything I think I know about my own recovery, so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please help me to see the truth.
Here’s how I boil that down: God, please help me to be as dumb as possible.
That’s a little blunt, but I love the general idea that the less I think I know, the more I want to listen and learn. That’s been a common theme of my recovery.
One time, when I had about 30 days off the sauce, I was telling a sober friend that I liked the steps but I had a list of tweaks I thought the 12-step founders should have considered. For instance, I didn’t like Steps 2 and 3, and I didn’t ever really hurt anybody but myself, so Steps 8 and 9 seemed unnecessary. And if you don’t believe in God, how can you pray?
He listened patiently before eventually telling me it sounded like I wanted to work a 7.5 step programs instead of a 12-step program. “And… I think you might need all 12,” he said, with a smile on his face.
I pushed back some more before he eventually laughed and said, “Dude, you better get stupid in a hurry.”
That’s one of the most important things anybody has ever said to me. I got a little pissy right afterward, but the next day, I asked him what he meant. He explained to me that the more I thought I had it all figured out, the more closed off I was going to be. He then jokingly said, “I want to introduce you to three words you might not have ever used for. They might be a foreign concept to you at this point but here they are: I don’t know. Have you ever said that in your life?”
I laughed and said of course I had used that phrase… but I couldn’t remember the last time I said those words. I spent a few minutes talking to him about why that might be. The answer is something along the lines of me, as an active addict, having to be a fast-talking scam artist who had gone to any lengths to keep my big con going. If you do that long enough, you have to always have an answer warmed up, ready to serve.
Somewhere in that conversation, he referred me to the “contempt prior to investigation” concept. That really hit home for me. The truth is, I did well in school, read every book I could get my hands on and had a quick enough wit to be a good member of the debating society. I really did not dust off the phrase “I don’t know” very often.
Like most suggestions in early recovery, I thought to myself, “What do I have to lose?” I decided to just do what the program told me to do for awhile and see what happens. So I did all sorts of things I hadn’t planned on doing—saying prayers, trying meditation, attempting to connect with a higher power, listening more than talking, restraint of pen and tongue.
It was awesome. My life got so much better, so fast, that I’ve never stopped believing in the idea that I just need to follow good orderly directions from my recovery programs and I will be okay.
Am I perfect at that? Nope. I still remember sitting at a work seminar a few years ago where the presenter put up a slide that was just a big red circle with a tiny black dot in the middle. He said the huge red circle was all of the information ever compiled in the history of the world. The small white dot was the amount that a typical person could know. I remember him saying, “You want to be the kind of employee who knows you’re the white dot and that the amount of stuff you know is much less than what you could know.”
My immediate thought? “I think my white dot is a lot bigger than what’s up there on the screen.”
I think about that story every time I hear the set aside prayer. It helps remind me to shut up, listen and learn. Oh, and that “I don’t know” is a very valuable phrase I should continue to use.
ALCOHOLIC JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke. Here goes:
When you drink vodka over ice, it can give you kidney failure.
When you drink rum over ice, it can give you liver failure.
When you drink whiskey over ice, it can give you heart problems.
When you drink grain alcohol over ice, it can give you brain problems.
Active alcoholic’s moral of that story: ICE IS REALLY BAD FOR YOU.
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